Mr. Speaker, I move that the fourth report of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration presented on Thursday, February 17, 2005 be concurred in.
The Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration has been very busy for the last month travelling across the country hearing from a variety of Canadians on issues of citizenship, family sponsorship, and settlement services. The government has been requested, urged, even begged by the standing committee to introduce a bill on citizenship to correct some of the difficulties and some of the manifest injustices in the current citizenship bill, yet the government has failed to bring in such a bill.
It was a rather historic day yesterday when a private member's bill was passed and received royal assent. For the last five or six years that private member's bill had been introduced by the Conservative Party and kept dying on the order paper as elections were called. The passage of that bill was a very positive and good occasion, as the Conservative Party was able to restore the citizenship of what I refer to as lost Canadians.
Lost Canadians are Canadians whose citizenship was stripped away unbeknownst to them in many cases because their father decided to take out citizenship in another country during a certain period of time. As a result of the father's actions, sometimes absent from the family and certainly without consultation with his Canadian children, the children lost their Canadian citizenship.
Some of these individuals actually had been born in Canada and had lived here all their lives, but when they applied for a passport to do some travelling, to their shock, horror and trauma they were told they were not Canadian citizens. Many of them banded together and formed an organization to push to have this injustice recognized and rectified.
The Liberal government blocked the move to provide justice to these people right up until the last day. It tried to amend and stall the bill. However, the opposition had the votes and we were able to hold off the government and have this injustice corrected. Many Canadians are rejoicing today because the citizenship that had been improperly stripped away from them through no choice of their own will be restored when they apply to have their citizenship recognized.
There are many problems in the immigration system which have occurred under the last decade or more of Liberal mismanagement. The largest is the problem of recognition of international credentials and experience. I would like to tell the House a story about one of my constituents which illustrates this all too well.
This is about a man from South America who has two master's degrees, one in science and one in education. He taught English as a second language for many years in South America. He speaks impeccable fluent English. He decided to seek a new life and new opportunities in Canada. When he visited the Canadian mission in his country, he was told he was exactly the kind of immigrant Canada wanted with his high education, his English fluency, his youth and ambition and young family. He was told Canada would welcome him. He and his wife sold their property and their assets in South America and travelled to Canada with their three children. They had high hopes and were looking forward to a warm welcome.
My constituent, who has two master's degrees, applied for a teaching position, which was what he had been doing for many years in South America. He was told he could not teach in Canada without a teaching certificate. He was told to go to the teachers' association to get it. He presented his transcript and his credentials to the teachers' association. He was told he would have to go back to university for at least two years to receive the Canadian equivalent of a teaching certificate.
This man, who has two master's degrees, was told that he would have to go back to university for two years. What a shock. He had no inkling of this prior to his immigrating to Canada.
A man just starting a new life in Canada with a wife, two children and no savings does not have the financial means to take two years off and pay for expensive studies in order to teach in his field. Here we have my constituent with two master's degrees, a long and distinguished history of teaching in his own country, and in order to support his family he has taken a job stocking vending machines. That is an illustration of how badly the Liberals have mismanaged this system.
As early as the first throne speech in 1994, when the Liberals took over the government, they promised with their hands over their hearts that they would do something about the problem with credentials.
Here we are today, more than a decade later, and the problem has not even been dented by the Liberals under the Liberal administration. In fact, the Conference Board of Canada has estimated that our economy loses at least $5 billion each and every year because of underemployment and unemployment of skilled newcomers to Canada.
As recently as last year, a Statistics Canada study found that recent immigrants were up to three times more likely than non-immigrants to suffer low incomes. The Statistics Canada study showed that the rate of low incomes has been rising among immigrants. This is under the Liberal watch. What a sad record for people who should be able to expect better from the Canadian government and from a country that says that we welcome skilled newcomers to Canada.
Another very difficult problem for people who come to Canada is the processing of sponsorships for family reunification. When people come to Canada they are told that the aging parents and grandparents they left behind, and other family members, will be welcome in Canada. They are told that they can apply to bring their dependent family members to Canada where they can care for them and be together. On that basis many skilled people choose Canada as their destination of choice.
We find that the Liberals have been completely dishonest with people, particularly with respect to the processing of applications to sponsor aging parents and grandparents. In fact, the Liberal government secretly stopped processing parent and grandparent applications.
What a betrayal to people who in good faith applied to have their aging parents and grandparents come to be cared for by the family here in Canada. In fact, this banning of the processing of applications not only was secret, but on the website where the government gave processing times it posted the historic processing time, even though they were no longer processing at all, rather than being honest about the fact that these applications which, if processed, would take years, if at all.
People had applied in good faith and paid money to sponsor their parents and grandparents. Sometimes this was money that was very hard to come by for struggling new families to bring their parents in and to honour them by caring for them in their old age. Yet the Liberals shut down that program without telling anyone. The government still took people's money but did not process those applications. What a shame.
Parents and grandparents emigrating from Mexico City, Santiago, Sao Paulo and Havana sometimes got in fairly quickly. However parents and grandparents emigrating from Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul and Taipei would take 10 times longer. Why under Liberal management is there this unfairness, this disparity where newcomers are not treated equally, fairly and with equity?
In some posts abroad, parents and grandparents may need to wait 15 years before receiving an immigrant visa. Were people told this at the time they made their applications? Absolutely not. What a betrayal by the Liberal government. Only recently when it got caught was there an announcement that suddenly things would change.
However they are not going to change soon. The targets for next year have already been set and the resources are not in place. In fact, since the Liberals took over in 1994, the revenue brought into the Department of Citizenship and Immigration has more than doubled due to fees and other moneys that are demanded of newcomers and yet not one penny of the new budget has gone into the department. No increase in funds to the department has meant that services have been cut back year after year. Face to face processing was eliminated. We moved to centralized call systems and case processing centres, many times not really connected with the communities and regions that were being served. Offices abroad were closed.
The number of Citizenship and Immigration Canada officers abroad were cut by 35%, nearly one-third of officers abroad at a time when we say we want to welcome and be active in bringing skilled newcomers to Canada.
The percentage of interviews has been substantially waived. All of this is under Liberal management with money going into the federal treasury from the immigration system and it is not being ploughed back into the system to serve the people who we say we want to bring to this country. What a travesty and what a shame.
The provision of settlement programs and settlement support for newcomers is also falling badly behind. There is the problem of short term and there have been changes in the funding. Many settlement service providers, who have been in the field for decades, are spending so much of their time on complex proposals rather than just getting the services to newcomers.
I think the saddest part for me is the treatment of children of newcomers. Children of newcomers have special needs. They often have no language skills because they do not come from countries where English is spoken. Many of them suffer from post traumatic stress syndrome because they come from wartorn and strife areas. There is also the clash of family norms and Canadian cultural norms which can be very difficult for children and parents to reconcile.
Problems of peer acceptance also cause some children serious social difficulty and yet the federal government has largely ignored the needs of these children and dumped the problem on municipalities and local school boards without working in a strong and good partnership to ensure children of newcomers are receiving the integration services that they require in order to succeed.
A lot of times the children of newcomers become the parent's bridge to the culture because they pick up the language more easily. The more difficulty children of newcomers have in adjusting, integrating and being accepted into the new culture in which they find themselves the more difficult it is for the entire family. It is a huge problem that is being largely ignored by the government.
We have settlement services that simply do not serve the needs appropriately and we have settlement service providers coming before the committee and pouring their hearts out about the problems that they find. They constantly complain about staff time being drained by the requirement to generate frequent and lengthy funding proposals, even those that have a proven track record over time.
Then there is the short term nature of federal funding, usually six months to a year, which makes long term planning impossible. The delays in funding are a problem. Waiting for funding to be released by the federal government, the settlement provider cannot move ahead and provide the services needed.
Also, the funding goes to the province where the immigrant first makes his or her home but often newcomers may move to a different location. That location receives nothing to provide services that are needed. There are enormous problems in the funding area.
We also know there is great dissatisfaction with the service provided by Citizenship and Immigration Canada. However I want to make it clear that this is not due to the fine civil servants who we have in the field. They are simply being starved of the resources that they need to do their job. More and more has been loaded onto their shoulders by inept policy and administration in Ottawa and the morale is sagging because of that.
As members of Parliament have found, there are enormous difficulties in managing the system. More and more frustrated newcomers or users of the immigration system are pouring into their MP's offices. MPs find that they are able to get less information about what is happening on case files and applications so they can assist constituents.
Processing times are expanding. The volume of inquiries is growing but without the resources to manage that, the call centres, which are supposed to be helpful to people, are having more problems. If callers can get through, which can takes hours or days, sometimes the information is not correct. This is a department with a system that is in complete disarray. It is a shame because it is costing Canada so much and it is costing newcomers by way of the human cost. The disintegration of this program in this department is enormous.
When I was first elected in 1993, probably 20% of my casework was immigration related and now it is at least 70%. I know from many of my colleagues in Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver where the bulk of newcomers first land, this is an even bigger caseload. It shows the ineptness of a department where the problems have to be dumped on the local MP office because the resources in the department simply are not there.
This is not a partisan issue. I know these concerns are shared by everyone in the House because I have worked with members from all parties on this file. There is an acknowledgement that it is a system under stress and strain.
The Conservative Party is looking forward to the opportunity, should the voters choose, to repair some of the difficulties in the system. We have just finished several weeks of cross country consultations with cultural groups and immigrant service providers to confirm the most pressing needs for change in the immigration system. We want to see a welcoming and well managed immigration system for Canada, one that earns the respect and confidence of newcomers and source countries for immigration, a respect that has been lost under Liberal mismanagement.
We believe there is so much that can and should be done in this important area of Canadian public policy. Immigration is a nation-building part of Canada, bringing energetic, enthusiastic and proud people from around the world to join us in building such a great nation. However we have a department that has been starved of resources and a department where policy is not honest with newcomers, such as secretly closing down the processing of parent and grandparent applications.
We have a department that is in disarray with the provision of services. We have a department where credentials is a pressing problem, with skilled newcomers taking jobs that are way out of their field, not being able to contribute to their full economic potential, many of them doctors and in the medical profession, and other skilled trades and professions, simply not able to make the contribution that they had hoped to make.
We have a real need to work on this system. I am looking forward to a Conservative government having the opportunity to do that.